Rob Windsor's Weblog

DevTeach Speaker Interviews

Mario Cardinal, who is one of the hosts of the Visual Studio Talk Show (which is recorded in French), spent a day at DevTeach walking around the Ballroom asking speakers and other luminaries (including myself) about their most favorite and least favorite feature of .NET. Mario posts the English answers on his blog.

http://www.mariocardinal.com/blog/Posts/20060516.html

DevTeach Day 2

The day started late (again). I missed the first couple sessions but made it to the Marriot in time to catch Mario Cardinal’s excellent talk on Sustainability and Inversion of Control. Mario discussed how to reduce dependencies between layers of your application with Dependency Injection.

I spent most of the time after lunch in the mini-lounge that had evolved in the ballroom talking with speakers (and whoever else would listen) about VB, Generics, Code Generation and a variety of other topics. I finished the conference day sitting in on Barry Gervin’s session on Building Location Aware Applications. It was a good introduction to a topic that’s important in the growing mobile application space.

The evening was spent watching parts of the Ottawa and Edmonton hockey games with the Mad Mexican’s posse (and Wings and Beer of course).

DevTeach - Special Report - The Mad Mexican

So the mystery of the Mad Mexican was revealed earlier today. He showed up at the conference to find his old wrestling partner, Johnny "the Pimp" Bristowe. The only problem was that the reunion ended up taking place at the end of a presentation that John was giving on WPF. Here's a photo story of the hilarity that ensued.

John has no idea what's about to happen:

The "Mad Mexican" appears:

John transforms into his alter ego:

The team is reunited:

DevTeach Day 1

The first day of seesions started a little late for me as I spent most of the night working. I missed the keynote but made it in time for the first of the breakout sessions. I decided to check out John Bristowe's session on VB 2005 and just before he started he asked if I wanted to come up and co-present. I took him up on his offer and it turned out to be a great talk (if I do say so myself), John covered each major section in his slides and then bounced it to me for some colour commentary. Thanks for the opportunity John. The rest of the day consisted of dropping by parts of sessions and hanging out in the ballroom with the speakers. There was more talk about this "Mad Mexican" but I saw no evidence of him.

The evening consisted of Smoked Meat for dinner (of course) and the a trip down to Old Montreal for with a bunch of user group leaders (D'Arcy, Nolan, Jason, Jen, Chris, and Donald) for some sightseeing and some beer. 

DevTeach Day 0

The first day of DevTeach (for me) was consumed by the Canadian User Group Leader Summit. The summit is hosted each year by DevTeach and held before the first day of sessions.

This year we had an amazing turnout with almost the entire country represented. There were leaders from Fredericton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria and Vancouver as well as four representatives from MSDN Canada. The discussion was very productive and it looks like there are going to be some changes that will extend Microsoft’s ability to help each group. There was also a very valuable discussion about techniques groups can use to raise money through sponsorship and donations.

Once again this year we went to Baton Rouge for lunch to continue discussions and to allow leaders separated geographically to get a chance to know each other.  Other than the fact that I forgot a hat and burned the top of me head and that Chris Dufour (from the East of Vancouver Toronto .NET User Group) kept mumbling something about a "Mad Mexican", it was fun and interesting.

The Back Button is Only a Bandage - What's the Solution?

Kate Gregory posts about a situation where she gave a user at her client’s office some advice that will end up saving that user about an hour a day. The part of Kate’s post I found most interesting was:

They were using a web app that was going to a lot of trouble not to look like a web app: the users all had a shorctut on their desktop to launch a browser pointed at the site, most of IEs toolbars were suppressed so you didn't think you were even in a browser, and so on.

The words literally jumped off the page (well actually the LCD display) at me. A web app that was trying not to look like a web app, a web app that was suppressing Internet Explorer’s toolbars, a web app that should have been a... say it with me class, A .NET SMART CLIENT.

I don't know any of the specifics about this particular application (like who built it or why it was built as a web application) so it's hard to say difintively that it should but been a smart client. I have worked at companies who've done similar things with ASP.NET when they could have built a smart client application though.

Unfortunately situations like this are far too common. I hope it won’t be long until issues like this are a thing of the past and all the client asks is why the buttons on their forms don't spin and show video.